Monday, April 26, 2010

But more significantly, and I think more permanently, Cthulhu is a very, very important monster for the modern age. He symbolizes the kinds of vast, impersonal, inevitable, unknowable fears we have now: global warming, terrorism, ecocide, future shock, and so forth. Lovecraft invented Cthulhu (at least in part) as a response to Einstein and Shapley and Hale demonstrating that the universe could not be known or mapped. It was too big, and our view was too limited. That still scares us today; we want to believe that we matter, and Cthulhu is there to say that we really don’t. That’s why he’s still calling to writers and artists even after 80-plus years.